Further Reflections on Good Friday: Christian Time Travel
What if you could have that moment to do over again? What if, next time, you can?
A blessed Good Friday to our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters.
Further thoughts from last week that I didn’t have, er, time to get to...
I don’t “get” how we could ever be outside of time. Never have.
If Christianity is true, God is the creator of all things. Having created even time and space themselves, He stands outside of them, and experiences (we suppose) all of time as one eternal now—“a thousand years as one day,” etc.
“You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of Your hands.
They will perish, but You remain;
And they will all grow old like a garment;
Like a cloak You will fold them up,
And they will be changed.”
We, being creatures, are totally different, very much in time, unable to escape it.
And yet.
Jesus sometimes talks as though we go to heaven or hell immediately upon our death—the parable of Lazarus; “today you will be with Me in Paradise.” On the other hand, He also sometimes talks as though we shall all “sleep” until He comes again, and raises us all up—“those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation”; “and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer . . . .”
So, which is it? Do we (each, individually) go straight to heaven or hell when we die, or will we (all together) wait for perhaps thousands of years before being raised, some to eternal life, some to eternal death?
Yet from God’s point of view (“a thousand years as one day”), in the end, it comes to the same thing; and you can just see how we might share in some fraction of God’s point of view, as we are freed from the confines of this life, and thus it might (a little bit) come to the same thing for us, too.
C. S. Lewis imagines, in The Great Divorce (chapters 13-14), a hypothetical conversation with someone who offers a perspective from beyond the grave:
“‘Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it. [¶]
“‘Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two. And wouldn’t Universalism do the same? Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time’s lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?’
“And suddenly all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.”
We have, then, a logical problem. We have reason to believe that we, being immortal souls made in the image of the eternal God, have, or shall have, at least one foot outside of time. Yet it is difficult to see how we, being who we are in this world, could ever be a creature that could live outside of time.
If everything we know of our experience in this life is seen through the lens of time, moment by moment, what would or could it mean for us to step outside of that, even in part? It is unimaginable.
And yet.
The older I get, the more I think I can see it, some little bit, in tiny glimpses along the way. It helps that as I get older, so many of the moments I experience are also, more and less, places I have been before. The longer my experience with dating and relationships, for example, the better I got at them: First occasionally, then more and more often, I would encounter a moment—a fight, a conversation, a comment taken well or poorly—and realize, I’ve been here before. It’s like a commute or a route that I’ve driven before—the more times I drive it, the more I can anticipate every difficult curve of the road, every place to watch out for pedestrians, every turn I would otherwise miss—I can see the future before it happens, because I’ve already been to the future. In dating,* as in Groundhog Day (or as with dodging bullets by anticipating the most probable paths in Equilibrium), this is an enormously useful skill, really verging on a superpower—and why not? By stepping a little bit outside of this world or time, you are, to that extent, exercising literally supernatural power, but that is no more than all of our minds ordinarily do—all the time, every day—by thinking about ideas and making decisions.
(* Some of the things that come up are particular to the particular girl—Rita’s interest in French poetry, in the clip above—but a lot of them are human universals, such as learning to resist the urge to tell the girl that her interests are a big waste of time. This past-future experience is also enormously useful in human relationships in general, but you notice it first in dating and relationships, partly because it’s easy to be so much more motivated to do well there.)
Madeleine L’Engle suggested that, depending on how you look at it, we are already time travelers, right now; it’s just that the default in our world is to go through time only in one dimension, and only in one direction.
If God sees our whole life laid out before him like a painting on the wall, we can imagine that in heaven we too might direct our gaze to one part of the picture or another, returning to favorite parts again and again, but also appreciating the harmony of the whole as only one standing back from the wall can.
When you see an old man repeating a joke or a story one more time, forgetting how many times he’s already told it before, or reminiscing about some favorite part of his life, supernatural power or made in God’s own image may not be the first descriptor that crosses your mind, but that, too, may be, as much as anything else, a question of perspective. And maybe if, at this stage of his life, he manages to avoid some of the errors and bad behavior of youth, we should meditate just as much on why that might be.
This, then, brings us full circle. Maybe I was tempted to think the liturgical calendar was dumb, or dumbed down—Why on earth, I thought, would we try to pretend we can’t see what’s coming next, or the rest of the whole year, or what has certainly already happened long ago—but on the contrary, maybe this is exactly the point; far from limiting our perspective, the liturgical calendar expands it: an advanced lesson that begins to teach us, just a little bit, the perspective of God himself, appreciating life as only one outside of time can.